"We're not a charity and we have no charitable assets," said Fred Hillmann, a company spokesman.

The executive board's actions, the Attorney General said, "constituted a waste of charitable assets."

If no claimants to the property existed, the state took possession of these properties as Dharmadeya (charitable asset).

The government also plans to encourage some of the £95bn of charitable assets to be invested in the bank.

We are going for a for-profit conversion with recognition of the charitable asset" in a new foundation," he said yesterday.

The suit said Texas Blue Cross was a charitable asset that could not be removed from the state.

The officials who flex their regulatory muscles this way say they have the right and duty to do so as guardians of charitable assets.

The New York plan also challenges the widely held legal doctrine used to protect charitable assets when a nonprofit becomes a profit-making entity.

Nor did they result in "other identifiable losses of charitable assets."

Nearly $9 billion in charitable assets had been transferred that way in other states by April.